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When Puccini Rode Tall In the Saddle

A scene from Puccini’s “Fanciulla del West” (“The Girl of the Golden West”) at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

MUSICAL centenaries are double-edged occasions. They can inspire illuminating perspectives on worthy topics, or they can be little more than knee-jerk pretexts for music publishers, presenters and record labels to fetishize round numbers in the name of sales, with musicologists gratefully riding their coattails. A centenary on Friday — that of the world premiere of Puccini’s “Fanciulla del West” at the Metropolitan Opera, to be commemorated there with the second performance of a revival of Giancarlo del Monaco’s 1992 production starring Deborah Voigt and Marcello Giordani — is a milestone well worth contemplating, as it recalls not just the birth of a great opera but a sort of coming of age of opera in America.

In 1903 the 20-year-old Metropolitan Opera began, for the first time, to set its sights on contemporary works. Masterminding that initiative was Otto H. Kahn, a German-born financier, arts patron and advocate of American composers, who joined the Met’s board determined to reshape the company’s heavily German profile. To that end he imported two Italians, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, general manager of the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan, and Arturo Toscanini, its principal conductor.

“My hope, when I came to America,” Gatti-Casazza wrote in his memoir, “was to be able to discover some good American operas, which I could produce and maintain in the repertory.”

Gatti-Casazza put his money where his mouth was. In 27 years as general manager of the Met, he presented 14 American operas (a record surpassed only by Julius Rudel, who produced 35 American operas in 22 years as general director of the New York City Opera). Most of Gatti-Casazza’s American operas conformed to a conservative post-Wagnerian style and duly became footnotes in music history, rarely performed and leading nowhere much (though one of them, Louis Gruenberg’s imaginative “Emperor Jones,” deserves revival).

Gatti-Casazza’s American opera enterprise also included works written in English and works on American subjects. Luckily the world’s greatest living opera composer at the time, Giacomo Puccini, harbored a keen interest in Americana.

Puccini’s fascination with the American West dated to 1890, when he saw William F. Cody’s touring show in Milan and wrote to his brother, “Buffalo Bill is a group of North Americans with a quantity of Indian redskins and buffaloes that perform splendid shooting tricks and truly represent scenes from the frontier.”

In 1907, during his first trip to New York, Puccini saw “The Girl of the Golden West,” a play by David Belasco, the American playwright, director, producer and designer; Puccini had based an opera on Belasco’s earlier drama “Madame Butterfly.” Puccini’s paralyzing three-year search for a suitable operatic subject was over. Madama Butterfly” had already tapped the natural synergy between Puccini and Belasco, both crowd-pleasing populists who focused more on a sturdy dramatic arc, filled out with realistic detail, than on literary distinction. The setting of “The Girl of the Golden West” fueled Puccini’s ever-deepening absorption with ambience. For him an opera’s setting was not merely background but the defining element of its musical and dramatic nature.

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A photograph from the premiere production of the opera in 1910 at the Met.Credit
Metropolitan Opera Archives

Belasco came by his Western location honestly. His parents, British Jews of Portuguese extraction, were among the original forty-niners who flooded northern California after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. On a visit to a Nevada mining camp the young Belasco heard the unforgettable singing of the minstrel Jake Wallace, on whose lips Puccini would place the plangent ballad that sets and sustains the pervasive air of nostalgia in “La Fanciulla del West.” And Belasco’s father was part of a posse that captured a wounded outlaw whose hiding place in a loft was betrayed by blood dripping into the room below. This slice of life would become one of the most gripping scenes in Puccini’s pioneering spaghetti western.

Belasco’s backyard was as exotic to Puccini as Cio-Cio-San’s Nagasaki or Turandot’s Beijing. In his search for “authentic” musical material, he drew from the kinds of music used in Belasco’s play: polkas, waltzes, ragtime and Latin-American tunes. These he applied with more zeal than precision, just as an American composer might indiscriminately swap a Sicilian tarantella for a Romagnan saltarello.

Puccini also mined American Indian musical material from several early ethnographic collections. These melodies granted him free access to whole-tone scales, with which he had been flirting since his early “Manon Lescaut.” In “Fanciulla” he used their roomy intervals not simply as markers for exoticism but also as aural metaphors for the wide-open spaces of the West.

The ink had barely dried on “Fanciulla” when, in the summer of 1910, Gatti-Casazza called on Puccini to convince him that his new opera should become the Met’s first world premiere. Gatti-Casazza stacked the deck by offering the tenor Enrico Caruso as the male lead and Belasco himself to supervise the production, along with all the creature comforts Puccini could want.

The signing of the contract between Puccini and the Met — flashily staged, with a golden pen, in Paris on June 9, 1910 — was just the first volley in a barrage of advance publicity unmatched in Met history until the current regime of the resourceful Peter Gelb. The Met spared no expense in promoting the “Fanciulla” premiere as an essential social event. The press dogged the heels of Puccini, Belasco and Toscanini. Tickets for the premiere, at twice the normal Met prices, disappeared swiftly and were scalped for as much as 30 times their box office price.

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Gatti-Casazza’s only misstep was to peddle “Fanciulla” as “Puccini’s American opera.” The composer responded, “The music cannot be called American, for music has no nationality — it is either music or nothing.” Contradicting himself later, Puccini said: “For this drama I have composed music that, I feel sure, reflects the spirit of the American people and particularly the strong, vigorous nature of the West. I have never been West, but I have read so much about it that I know it thoroughly.”

As Dec. 10, 1910, the day of the “Fanciulla” premiere, approached, New York whipped itself into a frenzy nowadays reserved for Yankees World Series wins or Justin Bieber shows. And “Fanciulla” did not disappoint, to judge from the 55 curtain calls and effusive press coverage.

But once the glow of the premiere had dimmed, it was open season on Puccini. Deaf to the innovations of his newest opera, critics became obsessed with the “inauthenticity” of everything from the singers’ gestures and makeup to the alleged misuse of American verbal locutions and musical idioms.

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Deborah Voigt and Marcello Giordani at the Met during a rehearsal of the opera , which celebrates its centenary this year.Credit
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Nicola Luisotti, who will conduct the Met revival, speculated on the work’s initial failure and subsequent lack of popularity. “There is no death, no blood, as there are in typical Puccini operas,“ he said. “The ending is quiet, not bombastic but not happy either. And the three leading roles are very difficult to cast.”

Perhaps even harder to swallow was — and is — the opera’s musical audacity. In “Fanciulla,” Puccini, alert to contemporary musical trends, followed his ever surer instincts toward a naturalistic music drama that absorbs short melodic units into a nearly seamless orchestral texture: anathema to those who like their Puccini served in easily digestible chunks. Like Verdi’s masterly “Falstaff,” which shares its continuous texture, “Fanciulla” is not easy to grasp on first hearing.

As for the work’s current standing, Deborah Burton, an assistant professor of music at Boston University and an organizer of a centennial symposium there on Monday as well as a splendid Web site on all things “Fanciulla” (fanciulla100.org), said: “It goes against a century’s worth of cinematic myths about the Old West. Instead of a strong, silent cowboy rescuing a helpless heroine, we have an emotionally vulnerable bandit rescued by a gun-toting, poker-playing, independent woman. But that’s actually much truer to history.”

“Fanciulla” may have imploded after its premiere, but its aftershocks have profoundly affected opera in America, for better or worse. Not only did it place the United States firmly on the world’s cultural map, it effectively ended German hegemony over America’s operatic life. The seminal opera companies of Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, born in its wake, are all Italian in provenance and aesthetics, and all thriving.

Less obvious but perhaps more important is the influence of “Fanciulla” on American opera. After it Americans wrote more often about America. Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “Shanewis,” done by the Met in 1918, became the first major American opera with a contemporary American setting, and the first with a libretto by an American woman, Nelle Richmond Eberhart.

Minnie, the fearless title character of “Fanciulla” and one of the few Puccini heroines left breathing at the final curtain, spawned a line of similarly strong, feisty, unorthodox American heroines. The leading women in Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah,” Douglas Moore’s “Ballad of Baby Doe,” Jack Beeson’s “Lizzie Borden,” Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina,” Richard Danielpour’s “Margaret Garner,” Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” and Mark Adamo’s “Little Women” may all be counted among Minnie’s heirs.

On the musical side Puccini’s full-throated, melodramatic and unabashedly tonal verismo style swiftly became and remained the lingua franca of American opera. Statistics compiled by the service organization Opera America clearly reveal that despite the plurality of musical and dramatic styles in opera today, “American verismo” continues its overwhelming dominance in the country’s mainstream opera houses. Hand in hand with that trend, the American operagoing public and critical establishment still nurse a deeply entrenched preference for a Belasco-inspired hyper-realistic theatrical style.

For the blessings and challenges it has brought us, let’s have, in the immortal phrase from “Fanciulla,” a “whiskey per tutti” in honor of Puccini’s American opera and the progressive spirit it represents.

A version of this article appears in print on December 5, 2010, on Page AR23 of the New York edition with the headline: When Puccini Rode Tall In the Saddle. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe